Monday, April 17, 2023

Volunteers build new opportunities, community and Waterloo's future

A message from Nenone Donaldson, Vice-President, Advancement.

Today marks the beginning of National Volunteer Week! Each year, the Office of Advancement reflects on the outstanding volunteer contributions from alumni and friends. Each individual contributes in their own way — like mentoring students and new grads, building Waterloo’s reputation through global events, or offering expertise to leadership — and they all help us build a brighter future for Waterloo and the world. This week, teams across Advancement will publicly recognize the thousands of volunteers who give their time to Waterloo. I hope you will join the celebrations on social media and thank them for the role they play in building our thriving global community.

Meet some of our dedicated volunteers.

Waterloo hosts Indonesian ambassador for Canadian kick-off of FINCAPES climate partnership

By Sam Toman. This is an excerpt of an article originally published on Waterloo News.

In April 2019, the government of Indonesia announced a 10-year plan to transfer all government offices away from its capital Jakarta to a new sustainable, planned capital city. Jakarta is well-known for its traffic congestion and poor air quality; however, sea level rise also played a role in the island nation’s unprecedented decision.

“When I heard the news that President Joko Widodo will implement this decision, I was very ecstatic,” says Maydison Ginting, the FINCAPES lead at Prasetiya Mulya University, one of the Indonesian partner universities for FINCAPES. “The move to relocate the capital city to East Kalimantan will emphasize green and environmentally sustainable economic principles. This is proof of Indonesia's commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2060.”

Indonesia’s bold leadership in managing climate change and sustainability is a primary reason the University of Waterloo chose to collaborate with Universitas Prasetiya Mulya (UPM) on this innovative program.

Flood Impacts, Carbon Pricing and Ecosystem Sustainability (FINCAPES) is a multi-stakeholder, gender responses initiative in Indonesia supporting adaptation and mitigation of climate change and conserving biodiversity. Funding includes $15,000,000 from Global Affairs Canada and $750,000 from Prasetiya Mulya.

On April 14 UWaterloo was visited by Daniel Tumpal S. Simanjuntak, Indonesian Ambassador to Canada for the Canadian launch of FINCAPES. On the UWaterloo side, the project is led by Prof. Stefan Steiner, PI, Statistics and Actuarial Science in the Faculty of Math. As a collaboration with the Faculty of Environment, Prof Steiner will work with domain experts Brent Doberstein of the Faculty of Environment and David Landriault of the Faculty of Mathematics. The Project Directors, Bill Duggan and Jean Lowry conceived the project as an evolution of the successful Risk Management, Economic Sustainability, and Actuarial Science Development in Indonesia (READI) project in the Department of Statistics & Actuarial Science.

Though similar in nature to READI, FINCAPES includes some important developments.

Read the full article on Waterloo News.

Q and A with the experts: World Hemophilia Day

Today is World Hemophilia Day under the theme ‘Access for all: prevention of bleeds as the global standard of care’. Dr. Andrea Edginton, Hallman Director at the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy, uses her research to help pharmacists, doctors and nurses manage treatment for hemophilia patients that has, in turn, helped these patients lead a better quality of life.

What is hemophilia?

Hemophilia is a rare genetic disorder, primarily affecting men, where a person’s blood does not clot correctly because they do not produce a specific clotting factor. This can lead to life-threatening internal bleeds and painful joint bleeds and, over time, significantly reduces mobility.  

How prevalent is hemophilia, and how is it treated?

Worldwide, just over 1.1M people are estimated to be affected by hemophilia, with 418,000 having severe hemophilia. Preventive treatment includes the replacement of missing clotting factors through frequent injections to avert bleeds. However, only 25 per cent of hemophilia patients receive adequate treatment due to high medication costs over a person’s lifetime and lack of access, particularly in lower-income countries. 

How has your research helped those with hemophilia?

Using advanced pharmacokinetic - how the body interacts with medication - modelling techniques, my research helps hemophilia treaters, and their patients, make optimal decisions about prophylactic clotting factor injections. With a team at McMaster University, we built and maintain the Web-Accessible Population Pharmacokinetic Service – Hemophilia (WAPPS-Hemo). This free web-based platform allows treaters to input patient information and clotting factor levels in their blood following an injection. The clotting factor levels are calculated over time to pinpoint when patients need another injection to reduce dose and injection amounts.

WAPPS-Hemo is the largest database repository in the world and is used in over 700 hemophilia treatment centres in over 50 countries. In addition, a patient-level app allows patients to self-manage their condition. 

A trick of the hat

By Joe Petrik.

A nearly 60-year-old mathematical problem has finally been solved.

The story began last fall when David Smith, a retired print technician from Yorkshire, England, came upon a shape with a tantalizing property. The life-long tiling enthusiast discovered a 13-sided shape — dubbed the hat — that is able to fill the infinite plane without overlaps or gaps in a pattern that not only never repeats but also never can be made to repeat.

This elusive shape is known to mathematicians as an aperiodic monotile or an einstein, a clever pun that takes its name from the German words ein and stein that mean one stone.

“Dave and I had been in touch over the years and we belong to the same old-fashioned listserv for people interested in tiling, a mix of tiling enthusiasts, programmers and mathematicians,” recalls Cheriton School of Computer Science professor Craig S. Kaplan, who collaborated with Smith, software developer Joseph Myers and mathematician Chaim Goodman-Strauss on the paper that has proven that the elusive einstein exists.

“Dave was on to something big, something historic, but he hit the wall on what he could deduce about this shape by working with paper cut-outs. He knew I had recently published a paper about a related topic for which I developed a piece of software that we could use to understand what his shape was doing. He sent me an email asking, ‘Hey, can you run this through your software and see what happens?’”

Professor Craig S. Kaplan holds two einstein tiles, a 13-sided shape he and his collaborators call the hat that can tile the plane indefinitely without the pattern ever repeating. Professor Kaplan is interested in a broad range of interdisciplinary topics, with a particular focus on interactions between mathematics and art. He uses mathematical ideas to create tools and algorithms that generate ornamental patterns and that empower artists and designers. His work incorporates knowledge from computer graphics, classical and computational geometry, human-computer interaction, graph theory, symmetry and tiling theory, and perceptual psychology.

Mathematicians had been trying to find a shape like David Smith’s einstein since the 1960s when American mathematician Robert Berger discovered the first example of aperiodic tiling.

“Berger’s aperiodic set of shapes was found in the mid-1960s and that set had 20,426 shapes,” Professor Kaplan explained. “It was an elaborate construction with a combinatorial set of features that required a multiplicity of shapes to guarantee that the pattern doesn’t repeat. That was an important discovery, but the natural next question for mathematicians is, can we get smaller sets? What’s the lowest number of shapes we can do this with?”

By 1970, the set of shapes proven to tile aperiodically was down to about 100 and in 1971 mathematician Raphael Robinson got it down to six. Then, in 1974, Sir Roger Penrose discovered the eponymous Penrose tiles, which reduced the number to two.

“Those two shapes in Penrose’s solution had enough structure that they forbid periodicity. But for almost 50 years mathematicians have been wondering, can we get down to just one shape? Can we do this with a monotile? That’s the problem we solved. We found a single shape that does what all these earlier sets of multiple shapes are able to do.”

In mathematics and computer science many problems remain open, but theoreticians have a strong sense what the answer will be even though a formal proof may be decades away.

“The famous P vs NP problem in computer science — a question about how long it takes to execute a particular class of algorithms — is still open, but there’s a consensus how that’s going to play out,” Professor Kaplan said. “Almost every computer scientist thinks that P is not equal to NP. But the existence of an aperiodic monotile isn’t in that category. Opinions were split. That’s one of the things I love about this problem. It was not obviously true or obviously false. The only thing I knew for sure is that if it’s false — if no aperiodic monotile exists — it would be extremely difficult to prove because that’s a statement about all possible shapes. Whereas, proving that a particular shape is an aperiodic monotile is easier because, well, here it is. You’re only trying to prove a property of a single shape.”

Many have wondered if the hat — sometimes also called the shirt — has other tricks up its sleeve. In a sense it does.

“In our paper we show that the hat is not just a single shape that tiles aperiodically, but a member of a continuum of shapes. We can say that the hat is not the only aperiodic monotile, but it feels like a bit of a cop-out because all those shapes are closely related. They’re one big family. The more interesting question is are there fundamentally different aperiodic monotiles? My answer is that there’s no reason to suspect otherwise and every reason to suspect there ought to be others.”

As shown in this looping animated GIF, the hat is one member of a continuous family of shapes that are all aperiodic, and that all tile the plane in the same way.

The main proof in the paper is combinatorial and benefits greatly from computer assistance, Professor Kaplan said. “It’s combinatorial in that there are a few steps in the proof that depend on examining all the ways individual tiles can be next to each other and all the ways tiles can group together into larger and larger clumps. As it turns out, there are a lot of ways. Depending on what you’re counting, it’s dozens, hundreds, thousands.”

You could grind through all of those cases tediously by hand, but if you have a computer science background so much the better. Why not write a piece of software to do that for you?

“The key computer-assisted part of our proof involves saying, ‘We have to be able to say things about generic tilings of the hat that we don’t know anything about.’ But how can we say anything about a tiling whose structure we have no control over? In this part of the proof, we show that even though you didn’t know anything going in, the tiling has a certain structure that you can account for. One way you can do that is to exhaustively enumerate little neighbourhoods of tiles — all the little neighbourhoods that possibly could occur in a real tiling.”

A lot can be rejected. In one particular neighbourhood, you see there’s no way to surround those tiles by another layer of tiles, so it couldn’t occur in a real tiling. It’s just an isolated blob.

“We can write a program to find all the ways you can have a little blob that is legally able to occur in a full tiling and we then wrote code that says something interesting about each of those different blobs that allows us to conclude that therefore an arbitrary tiling must have the properties we want it to have. The program we wrote confirms that those rules are followed in every possible tiling.”

Penrose’s tiles were found to have a deep connection to the natural world. In 1982, Iowa State University Professor Dan Shechtman discovered that symmetries similar to the ones in Penrose tiles are found in molecular structures called quasicrystals — a crystalline molecule that is ordered but not periodic — a discovery that led to his receiving the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“It’s fun to speculate, but I’m not a physicist or an engineer,” Professor Kaplan said. “That the Penrose tiling has a connection to materials science is amazing, but it’s no guarantee that other aperiodic tilings do or that the hat will. My work is about the applications of mathematics in art. First and foremost, for me the hat tiling is interesting and it is visually arresting. People have already been using it to make interesting designs in different media. Please keep doing that. That’s amazing and I love it.”

An interpretation of the hat monotile, as gingerbread cookies. This tweet was one of many using different media to share the discovery.

Perhaps the hat could leave its mark at Waterloo in a more concrete way.

“There’s a stone courtyard at the University of Oxford’s Mathematical Institute where Penrose works that has been tiled with Penrose tiles. If you have a breakthrough in tiling theory, how are you not putting that on the floor of one of your academic buildings? The timing is nearly perfect now that the Math 4 building has been approved for construction and is in the design phase.”

Senate meets today and other notes

The University's Senate meets today at 3:30 p.m. in NH 3407. Among the agenda items:

• A motion to approve revisions to the Grading scheme text in the Grades and grading section of the Graduate Studies Academic Calendar, effective spring 2023;
• A motion to acclaim the membership of Senate committees and councils and the Board of Governors as provided on the list of nominees, and a motion to delegate approval to the Senate Executive Committee for any vacancies which exist;
• A motion to approve the delegation of its authority for the approval of the roster of graduands jointly to the chair and vicechair of Senate, for convocation ceremonies scheduled in June 2023 and October 2023 and that a full report on the complete roster of graduands be presented for information to the Senate meeting following the relevant convocation;
• A motion to give first reading to the amendments to Senate Bylaw 4, with said amendments to effect the removal of the Vice-President, Advancement, the Vice-President, University Relations, and the Deputy Provost, Integrated Planning and Budgeting as ex-officio members of Senate and the addition of the Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism, the Associate VicePresident, Indigenous Relations, and the Associate Vice-President Academic Operations as ex-officio members of Senate;
• A motion to give second and final reading to amendments to Senate Bylaw 1, and ensures the guidelines for the annual schedule of meetings and approve the changes to the annual work plan.

There will also be a Strategic Plan Thematic Session panel discussion on the subject of Communities.

The full April 2023 Senate agenda is available on the Secretariat's website.

The Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism’s Education and Outreach Unit has added new workshops to its offerings this spring:

• 2SLGBTQIA+ Fundamentals, Tuesday, April 25, 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., online;
• Virtual Lunch & Learn: Developing an Anti-Oppressive Practice in Student Services, Wednesday, May 10, 12 noon to 1:00 p.m., online.